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“... to publish her first big book, the 1990 novel The trick is to keep breathing, with Polygon, the small publisher of which Edinburgh Review is a part. It is conventional, when discussing ‘the new Glasgow writing’, a movement taken to involve man of pairts Alasdair Gray and poet Tom Leonard as well as Kelman and Galloway, to open on a sort of pen-Polaroid ...”

“... eyes suggesting mystic withdrawal. Its grossness, in profile, makes one think of a cow. But when small boys or bored askaris tease it, it is transformed, it is doglike. One takes evasive action as it sprints past to pose, ears cocked horizontally, staring at its persecutors, on the bank by the clubhouse steps; one expects it to bark. It is said that, before ...”

“... as entitled to stick up for its vital interests as the largest. If there were to be vetos, then small states should have them too. Of course this ideal was moderated by reality. But this was a Europe which, as a Danish foreign minister later observed, was designed to make the continent safe for small nations. In the ...”

“... Sillars, the other central figure in the book is the SNP’s onetime guru-in-chief, the late Stephen Maxwell, whose name is largely unknown even to those who follow Scottish politics. Nobody did more than Maxwell to formulate the now dominant idea of left-wing nationalism. As late as 1982, Alex Salmond and other members of the Maxwellite 79 Group were ...”

“... The new government of 1979 had no grand plans for privatisation. It was intended that a number of small, state-owned enterprises would be sold off, but even the Tory radicals did not contemplate taking the utilities – natural monopolies providing essential services – out of the public sector. An increasingly peremptory Prime Minister, however, came to see privatisation as a ‘central means of reversing the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism’ and ‘reclaiming territory for freedom ...”

“... at which it can manageably be renounced altogether. For example, when, near the end of the novel, Stephen Latimer declares that he has fallen in love, genuinely and for real, Miss Morrow’s response is ‘Oh, I see.’ Barbara Pym continues: ‘Miss Morrow had difficulty in keeping her disappointment out of her voice. She had somehow expected something less ...”

“... has at times analysed wonder – notably in relation to exploration and discovery, as in Stephen Greenblatt’s Marvellous Possessions – but has more pervasively and implicitly celebrated it and capitalised on it, offering up Renaissance England for the bedazzlement of American graduate students as itself a cabinet of wonderful curiosities. Both ...”

“... and his little brother, Allen, head of the CIA. Both were former legal advisers to United Fruit. Stephen Kinzer and Stephen Schlesinger’s classic history of the coup, Bitter Fruit (1982), showed that many of the players behind it were either United Fruit stockholders, or angling for a seat on the company board, or ...”

“... to him, to have his intellectual property pirated. When it came to such things, Hooke was, as Stephen Inwood rightly says, ‘a rough fighter’. That attitude was at once wholly natural and deeply problematic in Restoration scientific circles. As Rob Iliffe and Adrian Johns have shown, it was the norm for mechanics and tradesmen vigorously to contest ...”

“... brothers. At the Cliveden swimming-pool Jack met, not for the first time, Astor’s osteopath, Stephen Ward, ‘the Doctor’ of the quadrilateral, and the exceptionally pretty Christine Keeler. Profumo, as he later put it, ‘was extremely taken by Christine, whom I thought was Ward’s girlfriend, but he did not seem to be particularly possessive about ...”

“... rendition’ thanks to the work of journalists writing for mainstream media. One of these is Stephen Grey, a regular contributor to the New York Times, the Guardian, the Times, the Sunday Times and the New Statesman. His new book divides fairly neatly into an account of how he and his colleagues uncovered the CIA’s secret flights to torture centres and ...”

“... life which combines both pride (one scene takes us on a detour to Cary Grant’s birthplace) and small-mindedness. I especially liked the DIY assistant who, on being told that her work colleague has just brutally murdered her husband, replies: ‘I always said she had a hard little face.’ Stevenson’s novel must be regarded as an interesting hybrid rather ...”

“... a juvenile sensationist with enthusiasms and ideas as quick and darting as the movement of his small feet across open grass. And all the while, the hum of his parents’ crack-up presses its way into his head. No previous character of Doyle’s has had this degree of interior life, nor anything like Paddy’s capacity for wonder. Not that Doyle’s ...”

“... reviewed to books published. But that won’t happen. Most books will remain unnoticed; the same small number will be reviewed, for a while, in a larger number of places. In all too many of these places there will simply be more of the customary rubbishing and rave. Few people can be looking forward to the dawn of a new respect for the judgments purveyed by ...”

“... boring world. Most of what is known in popular culture about Gypsy comes from the musical that Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents made out of her 1957 memoirs, and most of that is about the original momager, Rose Hovick. It’s a showbiz story about a hard-driving mother and the daughters she drives away. It’s still performed all the time, endlessly ...”